The whole world today tends toward a monstrous egotism.  Man’s attention is centered on himself, his temporal salvation, his external prosperity.  Preaching, yielding partly to the intellectual and partly to the practical environment, has tended to adopt the same secular scale of values, somewhat pietized and intensified, and to move within the same area of operation.  That is why most preaching today deals with relations of men with men, not of men with God.  Yet human relationships can only be determined in the light of ultimate ones.  Most preaching instinctively avoids the definitely religious themes; deals with the ethical aspects of devotion; with conduct rather than with worship; with the effects, not the causes, the expression, not the essence of the religious life.  Most college preaching chiefly amounts to informal talks on conduct; somewhat idealized discussions of public questions; exhortations to social service.  When sermons do deal with ultimate sanctions they can hardly be called Christian.  They are often stoical; self-control is exalted as an heroic achievement, as being self-authenticating, carrying its own reward.  Or they are utilitarian, giving a sentimentalized or frankly shrewd doctrine of expediencies, the appeal to an exaggerated self-respect, enlightened self-interest, social responsibility.  These are typical humanistic values; they are real and potent and legitimate.  But they are not religious and they do not touch religious motives.  The very difference between the humanist and the Christian lies here.  To obey a principle is moral and admirable; to do good and be good because it pays is sensible; but to act from love of a person is a joyous ecstasy, a liberation of power; it alone transforms life with an ultimate and enduring goodness.  Genuine Christian preaching makes its final appeal, not to fear, not to hope, not to future rewards and punishments, not to reason or prudence or benevolence.  It makes its appeal to love, and that means that it calls men to devotion to a living Being, a Transcendence beyond and without us.  For you cannot love a principle, or relinquish yourself to an idea.  You must love another living Being.  Which amounts to saying that humanism just because it is self-contained is self-condemned.  It minimizes or ignores the living God, in His world, but not to be identified with it; beyond it and above it; loving it because it needs to be loved; blessing it because saving it.  In so doing, it lays the axe at the very root of the tree of religion.  Francis Xavier, in his greatest of all hymns, has stated once for all the essence of the Christian motive and the religious attitude: 

  “O Deus, ego amo te
  Nec amo te ut salves me
  Aut quia non amantes te
  Aeternis punis igne.

  “Nee praemii illius spe
  Sed sicut tu amasti me
  Sic amo et amabo te
  Solem, quia Rex meus est.”

What, then, has been the final effect of humanism upon preaching?  It has tempted the preacher to depersonalize religion.  And since love is the essence of personality, it has thereby stripped preaching of the emotional energy, of the universal human interests and the prophetic insight which only love can bestow.  Over against this depersonalization, we must find some way to return to expressing the religious view and utilizing the religious power of the human spirit.